The present invention relates to facilitating communications between a telephony user and an on line user, and in particular, relates to facilitating instant messaging between these users.
The rapid acceptance of the Internet has changed the way in which people communicate. A significant number of letters and telephone calls have been replaced with email messages. Although email is an effective communication medium, ongoing on line communications are often hampered because of the extra steps necessary to view, reply, and send email messages. Further, email provides no way of knowing if the person with whom someone is communicating is on line at that particular moment. With these deficiencies, instant messaging (IM) has gained great popularity over email to facilitate immediate and ongoing on line communications.
Typically, IM allows users to form a list of people with whom they wish to communicate. This list is typically called a xe2x80x9cbuddy list,xe2x80x9d and most IM services allow users to communicate with anyone on their buddy list, assuming that the person is on line at that given time. Generally, users will send an alert to those persons on their buddy-list who are on line prior to engaging in a conversation. Most IM services provide a small text window where two or more users can type messages that both users can instantly view. IM services not only allow users to send notes back and forth while on line, they can also allow users to set up chat rooms to communicate with groups of users, and to share links to web sites as well as images, audio, and the like.
Given the-wide acceptance of IM, there is a need to support IM between traditional on line users and traditional land-based or wireless telephony users, who are restricted to using voice to send messages and to receiving audible messages. For conciseness and readability xe2x80x9con line userxe2x80x9d is used to refer to traditional on line users that interact with IM services through a personal computer or like text-based device.
The present invention allows telephony users and on line users to communicate with one another using an instant messaging (IM) service. The on line IM user will provide and receive textual messages, wherein the telephony user will provide and receive corresponding audible messages. To allow more efficient interaction with the telephony user, responses to queries posed to the telephony user are structured with possible answers. The answers are used to define and limit the voice recognition grammar for processing the telephony user""s response. Predefining the grammar for responses increases the effectiveness of the speech recognition system and the integrity of the IM session. Further, voice commands may be predefined to facilitate better control of the IM session as well as provide more effective communications.
In one configuration, an IM proxy server is used to act as a liaison between a traditional IM service supported through an IM proxy server and the telephony user. In essence, the IM server effectively treats the IM proxy server as a second on line user. The IM proxy server interacts with an audio browser to communicate with the telephony user via a telephone network and act as a proxy on behalf of the telephony user for the IM server.
The audio browser effectively translates speech-to-text for messages directed to the on line IM user and translates text-to-speech for messages received from the on line -user and directed to the telephony user. The IM proxy server interacts with the audio browser to receive text converted from audio from the telephony user and provides an equivalent instant message to the IM server for delivery to the on line IM user.
Similarly, messages directed to the telephony user via a mobile terminal or the like and received by the IM server from the on line IM user are forwarded to the IM proxy server. The IM proxy server will process the message to form a text-based message ready for conversion to an audio format. The processed message is sent to the audio browser, which converts the message to an audio format and delivers it to the mobile terminal; As such, the audio browser provides text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion to facilitate communications between the IM proxy server and the mobile terminal. The IM proxy server translates text messages to and from other text messages in a manner consistent with instant messaging.
In operation; the audio browser will receive a message and convert audible commands within the message for processing by the IM proxy server. The IM proxy server will receive the command derived from the audio message and create an instant message based on the message meaning and any associated characteristics. The instant message is then delivered to the on line IM user via the IM server.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate the scope of the present invention and realize additional aspects thereof after reading the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments in association with the accompanying drawing figures.